The Duty to Promote Digital Minimalism in Others I: Duties of Virtue

Abstract

In this chapter, we introduce the duty to be an attention ecologist, one who promotes digital minimalism in others. After arguing for the existence of this duty on Kantian grounds (i.e., as following from a duty to respect humanity), we address an objection from Kant himself, who thought that we cannot be obliged to perfect others (which attention ecology seems to demand). We rebut the objection and explore one (of two) sides of attention ecology, i.e., the duty understood as a duty of virtue (in contrast to a duty of right, which we explore in Chap. 6). Here, “virtue” and “right” are Kantian terms of art, the core difference being that duties of virtue cannot be coercively enforced, whereas duties of right can. We show that attention ecology, understood as a duty of virtue, has implications for parents, teachers, friends, employers, and developers. The demands of the duty are conditioned by relationships that constitute these roles; the demands it makes of parents, for instance, are different from those it makes of employers because the relationship between parents and children is different from that of employers and workers. Much of the chapter is dedicated to exploring these differences.

Under the present conditions of human beings one can say that the happiness of states grows simultaneously with the misery of human beings. And there is still the question whether we would not be happier in a raw state, without all this culture, than we are in our present condition. For how can one make human beings happy, if one does not make them moral and wise?

—Kant, Lectures on Pedagogy (UP 9:451) (Kant’s lectures on pedagogy can be found in Kant (2007a).)

“‘On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it’s closer to crack cocaine,’ Mr. Anderson said of screens. Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naïve, he said. ‘We thought we could control it,’ Mr. Anderson said. ‘And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand.’”

—Nellie Bowles (2018a) (This comes from a New York Times article about how parents in Silicon Valley have come to appreciate the dangers that screen time poses to their children. It was titled “A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley.” This quote comes from Nellie Bowles’s interview with Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired. See Bowles (2018a).)

5.1 Introduction

In the previous chapter, we argued that you have a duty to be a digital minimalist. Our conclusion was that you owe it to yourself to be more intentional about how you use mobile devices and how you engage with the attention economy. You should use these technologies in ways that do not interfere with your ability to set and pursue your own ends. And although we are fully committed to that claim, we do have some reservations about it. There is something troubling about characterizing the issue as if it all boiled down to personal responsibility.¹ After all, we have already explained how several external forces are at work in creating and sustaining our unhealthy relationships with mobile devices.

First, there are the developers and tech companies, who work tirelessly to create products that are addictive. Second, educators and employers compel us to use technology in ways that all but require us to have problematic relationships with mobile devices. And, finally, the young adults of today grew up in a world that was saturated with smartphones, tablets, and social media. They were lured into using mobile devices before adulthood, forming bad habits before they were entirely responsible for their own actions. Technology began undermining their autonomy before it was even fully formed.²

So it is important not to overlook the social dimension of this problem. Although we do have duties to ourselves to restructure our relationship with technology, this is not the end of the story. It would be a mistake to think that there is a simple, individualistic solution to a complex, collective problem. It may be tempting to believe that we can solve the problem by going camping without our phones, meditating, or participating in a “digital detox” retreat. But that’s not enough. James Williams, a former strategist at Google,³ uses a helpful analogy to explain the shortcoming in this way of thinking. He says a digital detox is “not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution. It might, for a short period of time, keep, at an individual level, certain effects at bay. But it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues” (Hari 2022, 101).

Addressing these systemic issues will be our aim for the remainder of the book. We begin in this chapter by defending the existence of a duty to promote the autonomy of others with respect to their use of mobile devices. We call this the “duty to be an attention ecologist.”⁴ In many ways, the argument for this conclusion will resemble the argument of the previous chapter. We will continue to rely on the conclusions of Chap. 2. The moral obligations described in this chapter are grounded, once again, in the idea that autonomy is morally valuable and that we are obligated to respect humanity.

We begin by modifying the argument from the previous chapter. The duty to promote the autonomy of others is not, strictly speaking, identical to the duty to promote your own autonomy. You have control over yourself, but you do not (and should not) have sovereignty over other autonomous adults. So we must present an amended version of the argument in order to extend the duty to others. In the next section we address an obstacle that Kant’s ethics presents for this project. Once we have established the existence of a duty to be an attention ecologist, we present three applications of this obligation.

As we will explain, you are not in a position to promote everyone’s autonomy. Not only would that be impossible, in many cases it would be inappropriate. Imagine you see a stranger working in a cafe. You watch them struggle to complete a work-related task because they keep responding to social media notifications on their phone. It would not be your place to tell them how to conduct their affairs. You have no obligation to promote their autonomy with respect to their phone, and it would be disrespectful of you to interfere. So we must show why the duty to be an attention ecologist applies in some contexts rather than others. We take this on in Sect. 5.3 where we discuss the special obligations that parents and teachers have to promote the autonomy of their children and students. These are two important instances of the duty to be an attention ecologist. There are good reasons to think that parents and teachers have agent-relative obligations to promote autonomy, as the cultivation of autonomy is arguably a constitutive aim of these relationships.

In Sect. 5.4, we transition to a different set of duties to others. In some cases, we have positive duties to cultivate the autonomy of others (such as parents and teachers). In other cases, our duties to others involve negative duties to refrain from undermining someone else’s autonomy. In Sect. 5.4, we will discuss obligations that employers and software developers have to refrain from undermining the autonomy of employees and users. The duties in Sect. 5.3 are what Kant calls “duties of love,” and the duties discussed in 5.4 are “duties of respect.”⁵

5.2 The Argument to Be an Attention Ecologist

In the previous chapter, we gave an argument for a duty to oneself to be a digital minimalist; in this chapter we will give a corresponding argument that we also have a duty to be an attention ecologist, one who promotes digital minimalism in others. The philosophical core of the argument for digital minimalism ran as follows:

• P1_a Humanity has an objective, unconditional, non-fungible value––dignity.

• P2_a Anything that has dignity ought to be respected as an end and never treated as a mere means.

• P3_a If humanity ought to be respected as an end and never treated as a mere means, then we ought to adopt the end of our own natural perfection.

• Therefore,

• C1_a We ought to adopt the end of our own natural perfection.

From here, we argued that, given the empirical evidence, C1_a gives rise to a duty to be a digital minimalist.

• It would seem that the corresponding argument for attention ecology would run as follows:

• P1_a Humanity has an objective, unconditional, non-fungible value––dignity.

• P2_a Anything that has dignity ought to be respected as an end and never treated as a mere means.

• P3_b If humanity ought to be respected as an end and never treated as a mere means, then we ought to adopt the end of others’ natural perfection.

• Therefore,

• C1_b We ought to adopt the end of others’ natural perfection.

From here, we could, like the argument for digital minimalism, argue that:

• P4_b Mobile device use threatens to undermine others’ capacities of rational agency and authenticity. The compulsive use of such devices is inconsistent with the end of natural perfection.

• P5_b If P4_b and C1_b are true, then we ought to promote in others a disposition to use mobile devices intentionally and in ways that do not undermine their capacities (i.e., we ought to be attention ecologists).

• Therefore,

• C2_b We ought to be attention ecologists.

We ultimately think that this strategy works. However, we cannot accept the argument for attention ecology without further comment.

Kant rightly thinks we stand in a very different relation to our duty to perfect ourselves than to any duty that we might have to perfect others. One major difference—one that we, like Kant, accept as important—is that others’ sovereignty over themselves conditions how we might fulfill the duty (if we indeed have it at all). While one might, out of respect for their own autonomy, use a browser extension to limit their access to certain distracting websites, they should not simply log on to their partner’s device and do the same. They would, at the very least, need to obtain permission first. Indeed, Kant thought that the asymmetry was so significant that he, at times, expressed it in ways that might be thought to undermine P3_b. At times, he seems to imply that it is impossible and therefore not obligatory to adopt the end of perfecting others.

Our immediate goal, then, is to explain Kant’s reasons for thinking that taking the end of perfecting others is impossible and to explain why his reasons do not block the above argument for attention ecology. Grappling with Kant on this issue will shed light on complications with pursuing the interpersonal goal of attention ecology that do not arise with the intrapersonal goal of digital minimalism; these complications will, in turn, inform our derivation of the specific duties of attention ecology over the next two chapters.

When Kant discusses obligations that stem from our duty to respect humanity, he identifies just two ends that we must set for ourselves: our own perfection, and the happiness of others. For him, these duties are asymmetrical. That is, he accepts:

The happiness/perfection asymmetry: We do have a duty to promote our own perfection, and we do have a duty to promote the happiness of others; however, we do not have a duty to promote our own happiness, and we do not have a duty to promote the perfection of others. (MS 6:386)

Kant thinks that we do not have a duty to perfect our own happiness because this is something that we already pursue naturally, making the language of duty a poor fit (G 4:414). When it comes to perfecting others, Kant seems to think that this is “self-contradictory” and therefore not required:

The perfection of another human being, as a person, consists in just this: that he himself is able to set his end in accordance with his own concepts of duty; and it is self-contradictory to require that I do (make it my duty to do) something that on the other himself can do. (MS 6:386)

Taking inspiration from Lara Denis (2001),⁶ we will read Kant’s argument as follows:

• P1_c If it is impossible for one to will the indispensable means to φ’ing, they cannot be required to φ.

• P2_c It is impossible to will the indispensable means of perfecting another person.

• C1_c Thus, one cannot have a duty to perfect another person.

The idea behind P2_c is that an essential element of the virtue in question is guiding oneself in accordance with one’s own concepts of duty. Further, Denis aptly notes, it is important to remember that P2_c states that we do not have it in our power to will (as opposed to, e.g., wish or want) the operative end: if we guide another, then they are not guiding themself. So, we cannot will the end in question. If this interpretation is correct—if setting the end of self-perfection is something one must do for oneself—then it might seem as though we simply cannot perfect another person without, as Kant says, contradiction (MS 6:386).

Now that we have deepened our understanding of Kant’s reasons for accepting the happiness/perfection asymmetry, we can explain why this argument poses no threat to our argument for attention ecology. Let us here canvass three strategies, each of which is compatible with the others and each of which saves P3_b from any threat posed by Kant’s argument. One approach simply rejects P2_c, ultimately concluding that Kant was wrong to reject the symmetry. Another strategy works around the asymmetry by grounding attention ecology in the duty to promote others’ happiness. Another shows that attention ecology can be conceived of as a negative duty, grounded in respect, to refrain from “giving scandal,” that is, tempting others to do what is wrong.

Despite the fact that any of the three responses could suffice as an answer to the challenge, we choose to work through all three because they shed light on different aspects of attention ecology that we would like to explore. For instance, seeing that we can conceive of attention ecology as an imperfect duty (via the first two strategies) sheds light on the positive aspects of the duty and assists in its applications to, e.g., students and children. Seeing that we can conceive of it as a negative duty will help when we talk about how it applies in more distant relationships, e.g., employer/employee, and whether legislators have grounds to codify aspects of the duty in the law.

In pursuing the first strategy—i.e., denying P2_c.—Denis notes that it is not impossible to will that we put another “in a position in which they can exercise either self-governance and correct their errors” (Denis 2001, 147). Korsgaard expresses a similar sentiment, stating that the happiness/perfection asymmetry is “overstated”:

[I]t is clear that we have a duty to provide for the moral education of our children, and, Kant himself insists, our intimate friends (MPV 387). Choosing ends on another’s behalf is as impossible as it would be disrespectful, but putting others in a good position to choose ends for themselves, and to choose them well, is the proper work of parents, teachers, friends, and politicians; providing for someone’s moral education as well as nurturing her self-respect is an important part of the way we do this. (Korsgaard 1996, 220)

This seems right. As Denis notes, our duty to promote the perfection of others would be one where we have latitude, and one that we could choose—as Korsgaard suggests—to fulfill in the case of our intimates (our children, close friends, students, and so on). O’Neill offers further suggestions on this front, stating that we can support the rational self-governance of others by, for example, ameliorating poverty, hunger, and political domination (O’Neill 1980; cf. Denis 2001).

In many cases, we are in a special position to know what our intimates have chosen for themselves or what they would need in order to be in a position to choose for themselves and could take it upon ourselves to provide this for them. Here Korsgaard—like Denis—lists a number of things we can certainly will in relation to the perfection of others. In many cases, our reach is conditioned by the relation in which we stand with the person whom we are interested in helping, but this is not always an obstacle. Sometimes it enables us to support them in the pursuit of their perfection.

But let us now suppose that this first strategy doesn’t work; suppose that we insist that P2_c is unassailable because we cannot, in some narrow sense, perfect others as persons (MS 6:386). Robert Johnson pursues this strategy in defending Kant from charges of inconsistency here. He states that one can be perfected as a person “only if and to the degree that it represents the exercise of that individual’s own will” (Johnson 2011, 146.) While we are not inclined to accept this (we think that the initial responses from Denis et al. to P2_c are successful) this still doesn’t block the argument for attention ecology. As Johnson is happy to admit, while we cannot perfect others as persons, we can perfect them in other ways: we can perfect them as pianists, or Spanish speakers, or marathon runners, or whatever skill it is that they are working on (other than rational agency as such).

As Wood (2004) reminds us, Kant claims that our duty of beneficence includes an obligation to promote exactly these sorts of things, including the “moral well-being” of others (MS 6:394). As he puts it:

Kant’s point could … be put this way: I do have a duty to promote my own happiness, but only insofar as my happiness falls under the heading of my perfection; and I do have a duty to promote the perfection of others, but only insofar as it falls under the heading of their happiness. (2004, 148)

So, on pain of inconsistency, it seems that even if the asymmetry is in some sense true, it must be limited in scope: it must leave room for a duty to promote the moral well-being of others out of our duty to be beneficent.⁷ Regardless of Kant’s position, this view became more popular in the decades after he wrote about it. Later German idealists, such as Fichte, held the position that we should indeed take on the project of morally perfecting others.⁸

Finally—even if we leave the aforementioned strategies on the table—there is another move available to us, and this is to ground the duty in a perfect duty to respect others, that is, to assist them in, as O’Neill puts it, “preserving them from temptation” (O’Neill 1975, 91), or as Kant would say, assisting them in refraining from “giving scandal” (MS 6:464). This would make attention ecology a perfect duty, one that would involve, say, not developing addictive applications or forcing workers and students to use smart devices in ways that are bad for them.

In sum, the happiness/perfection asymmetry, and Kant’s reasons for accepting it, do not seem to pose much of a challenge for us here. We can summarize our response to the apparent obstacle in the following way. The view we defend in this chapter is that we have a moral obligation to promote the autonomy of others with respect to their use of technology. Someone could object that this is inconsistent with what Kant says in the Metaphysics of Morals and is thus at odds with his considered view about our duties to others. We have outlined three possible responses to this objection. First, we could concede that our view is inconsistent with Kant’s and claim that he is simply wrong about morally perfecting others. Denis (2001) provides some reasons for doubting the soundness of Kant’s argument. Second, we could argue that our position contradicts what he says in the Doctrine of Virtue but that he overstates his position and fails to express his considered view. This is the strategy suggested by Wood. Finally, we could suggest that Kant is indeed expressing his considered view, but that our position is perfectly consistent with what he is saying. His reservation about morally perfecting others has a very narrow scope, and he simply means it would be impossible for us to autonomously set ends for others as this is something that they must do for themselves.

Note that these strategies open up different options to us. The first two pave the road for applications of attention ecology that are more positive, i.e., taking the end of perfecting another. The last is more negative: a duty to refrain from, e.g., tempting others to do what is wrong. This nicely corresponds to two sides of the formula of humanity (“act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (G 4:429)). One part of the formula asks us to treat others as ends (as something to promote), another to never use others merely as a means. This division nicely maps on to Kant’s distinction between duties of love (which ask us to promote others’ permissible ends) and respect (which ask us never to degrade another) (MS 6:450). This chapter will respect that division by first exploring the duty as it pertains to those that we seem to have a duty to perfect: our children, students, and close friends. Then, we will present duties of respect: employers to their employees and software developers to users. Finally, we will revisit respect as it applies to children, students, and close friends.

5.3 Applications of the Duty I: Always as Ends in Themselves

In the last chapter, we saw how imperfect duties involve moral discretion. They compel us to adopt some end, such as the happiness of others, but this does not tell us exactly what we must do to promote that end. You might promote the happiness of others by treating your lonely friend to dinner, volunteering at a homeless shelter, giving money to famine relief, or fighting climate change.⁹ When Kant says that imperfect duties leave us some latitude or “playroom,” he is not suggesting that imperfect duties are somehow less strict than perfect duties.¹⁰ You are strictly required to adopt the end in question, but you must determine for yourself how to promote that end.

In the previous section, we explained how the duty to be an attention ecologist can fall within the domain of beneficence. Promoting the happiness of others means pursuing their ends as if they were your own.¹¹ When a good student requests a letter of recommendation for law school, we write one in an effort to help them pursue their end. But what should we do if we see them struggling to study for the LSAT because, like Esther, they cannot resist the temptation to look at their phone? Surely we could help them pursue their end by helping them become a digital minimalist.¹² But as we pointed out in the introduction, it is not always our place to interfere with the affairs of others. How, exactly, can we determine when to act on the duty to be an attention ecologist?

In this section, we will discuss three contexts where it seems perfectly appropriate to promote digital minimalism in others. We will argue that parents are morally obligated to promote the autonomy of their children and we will defend a similar view with respect to teachers and their students. We believe (as Kant did) that fostering autonomy should be seen as a fundamental aim of parenting and teaching. We then extend the duty to close friendships. If you are close enough to someone to promote their ends as if they were your own, then you are probably in a position to help them have a healthier, more autonomous relationship with their mobile devices and the attention economy.

5.3.1 Implications for Parents and Teachers

It should come as no surprise that Kant championed autonomy as the principal aim of both parenting and education. After all, his thoughts on these issues were famously influenced by Rousseau’s Émile. Like Rousseau, Kant argues that the cultivation of autonomy ought to be the aim of the entire educational enterprise. In the end, Kant believes that this project must go beyond merely building capacities. He believes that education should ultimately culminate in the proper exercise of rational agency: morality.¹³ But even if we do not share Kant’s particularly moralistic vision of education, we are likely to find something very plausible about his claim that parents and teachers ought to adopt the aim of cultivating autonomy.

For the most part, parents already see this as an important part of their job. They want to help their children become adults who are capable of setting and pursuing their own ends. Similarly, teachers tend to see themselves as developing their students’ capacities in such a way that they will be free to pursue a variety of paths in life. The two of us are parents and teachers, and we are certainly committed to the project of fostering the autonomy of our respective children and students.

We will present Kant’s thoughts on parenting and education alongside the work of contemporary philosophers.¹⁴ Luckily, there is a great deal of convergence on these issues. Many contemporary theorists of education share Kant’s commitment to the centrality of autonomy, as do those who write about parenting.¹⁵ And in both cases, we believe that attention ecology fits in very well with these projects. We will revisit some of the empirical conclusions presented in Chap. 3, but we will place a particular emphasis on the research that has looked at the effect of smartphones and the attention economy on children. We will begin with education and then turn to parenting.

When it comes to thinking about the purpose of education, a variety of things should come to mind. This is an important question—one that should be discussed far beyond the confines of academic philosophy. We need to be able to provide justifications for education, especially given the fact that almost every government in the world has laws requiring children to go to school.¹⁶ If the state is going to use its coercive power to make education compulsory, then it is incumbent on us to justify this constraint on people’s liberty.

For democratic countries, one potential justification would be the importance of an educated electorate. If citizens are going to enact their own legislation (or going to elect representatives who do that for them), then education surely has some value in this regard. We want our fellow citizens to be educated so that they can understand the policies that are being proposed and engage in rational deliberation about them. Indeed, the benefits of an educated citizenry are so vital to democracy that even libertarians like Milton Friedman believe that we can justify requiring the state to pay for education.¹⁷

And in addition to the positive externalities for democracy, education has undeniable economic benefits. We all have a stake in the existence of a thriving economy, and education can play an important role in enhancing the value of labor. By educating our citizens, we produce a more highly skilled workforce, and this benefits us all. Harry Brighouse refers to this as the “human capital theory approach” (2006, 27). He writes, “[T]he imperative is developing a strong and competitive economy, and the means is educating children to be productive workers. This benefits everyone; we all gain from higher Gross Domestic Product, and children gain from the fact that they are more able to operate well in the workplace” (Ibid.). To some extent, Brighouse is sympathetic to this aim. If we do not equip children with the tools they need to participate in the economy, then we would be depriving them of the basic tools they need in order to flourish. But he rejects the idea that this should be seen as the sole or primary aim of education.

Brighouse, like many other philosophers who discuss education, argues that we should see the cultivation of autonomy as the principal aim and justification of education.¹⁸ He does this on the grounds that autonomy is essential for flourishing. Many discussions of education (and parenting) make reference to the famous US Supreme Court case of Wisconsin v. Yoder.¹⁹ In the 1970s, three Amish students in New Glarus, Wisconsin stopped attending school after eighth grade. This was a violation of the state’s law on compulsory education (which required schooling until the age of 16).²⁰ The state argued that it should continue to require the students to attend school, but the representatives of the Amish claimed that further schooling would undermine the children’s religious upbringing and was thus at odds with the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion.

The court ultimately decided in favor of the Amish, as they agreed with the claim that further education would “gravely endanger if not destroy the free exercise of their religious beliefs” (Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 215–219). We do not have a particularly strong stance on the court’s decision. As Feinberg (1980) points out, there is not much difference between compulsory education ending at the age of 14 rather than 16. So the decision in the case might not be the most philosophically interesting issue. For many philosophers, it is the opinions of Justice Douglas and Justice White that have sparked the most interest.²¹ Justice White points out how the case would have been radically different if the Amish were trying to withdraw from compulsory education altogether. He argued that such an action would be unacceptable on the grounds that it would undermine the children’s autonomy to choose their own path in life:

In the present case, the State is not concerned with the maintenance of an educational system as an end in itself; it is rather attempting to nurture and develop the human potential of its children, whether Amish or non-Amish: to expand their knowledge, broaden their sensibilities, kindle their imagination, foster a spirit of free inquiry, and increase their human understanding and tolerance. It is possible that most Amish children will wish to continue living the rural life of their parents, in which case their training at home will adequately equip them for their future role. Others, however, may wish to become nuclear physicists, ballet dancers, computer programmers, or historians, and for these occupations, formal training will be necessary. There is evidence in the record that many children desert the Amish faith when they come of age. A State has a legitimate interest not only in seeking to develop the latent talents of its children, but also in seeking to prepare them for the lifestyle that they may later choose, or at least to provide them with an option other than the life they have led in the past. (Wisconsin v. Yoder, 239–40)

Justice White argues that education plays a vital role in equipping children with the capacities they need in order to choose their own path in life and to pursue it effectively. In other words, Justice White is concerned with what we have been describing as Kantian respect for humanity. He wanted to protect the children’s ability to set and pursue their own ends, and he recognized that education is indispensable in that regard.

The dissenting opinion of Justice Douglas is similar, but in some ways he was even more forceful about the rights of the children:

On this important and vital matter of education, I think the children should be entitled to be heard. While the parents, absent dissent, normally speak for the entire family, the education of the child is a matter on which the child will often have decided views. He may want to be a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer.

To do so he will have to break from the Amish tradition.

It is the future of the student, not the future of the parents, that is imperiled by today’s decision. If a parent keeps his child out of school beyond the grade school, then the child will be forever barred from entry into the new and amazing world of diversity that we have today. The child may decide that that is the preferred course, or he may rebel. It is the student’s judgment, not his parents’, that is essential if we are to give full meaning to what we have said about the Bill of Rights and of the right of students to be masters of their own destiny. (Wisconsin v. Yoder, 244–45)

Both of these opinions highlight something important about education and autonomy. Many children who grow up in the Amish community may find that they are perfectly suited for such a life. Living in such a tight-knit, religious community can provide them with profound goods that are difficult to find in other contexts. Some Amish children may see the value in that way of life and autonomously choose it for themselves. But others may find that this is not the life for them. And if those children are deprived of an education, then, as Justice Douglas says, they will be forever barred from alternative life paths.

This is why many philosophers see autonomy as the central value of education. We all want children to flourish. And, as Brighouse points out, we must recognize that not every child is lucky enough to be perfectly suited for the lifestyle, values, and commitments that they inherit from their parents.²² Accordingly, education must do more than teach children to read, write, and do arithmetic. It should give students a sufficiently broad view of the world so that they can choose their own path in life. We must give them the tools they need to author their own life stories.

As for parenting, we should be able to reach the same conclusion. Like teachers, parents are obligated to cultivate the autonomy of their children. The only difference is the grounding of the duty. Teachers are obligated to promote the autonomy of their students insofar as building capacities is a constitutive aim of education. Teachers voluntarily take on this role, so it is incumbent on them to adopt this end. The situation is similar for parents, but the conditions vary slightly. Obviously, there is (and ought to be) less freedom of exit for parents than there is for teachers. But, like teachers, parents owe something to their children when it comes to their autonomy. Imagine a set of parents who do nothing more than satisfy their child’s biological needs. The child has food, water, and a place to sleep, but her parents do nothing to cultivate her capacities. They do not read to her; they do not allow her to attend school (or educate herself); they do nothing to promote her basic physical abilities; etc. It is obvious that her parents have wronged her.²³ Parents are morally obligated to do more than just keep their child alive.

We may wonder what grounds parental obligations. Why should we think that parents owe it to their children to cultivate their autonomy? One way to answer this question is to point out that parents, like teachers, have (typically) taken this role voluntarily. But the child did not. Children are, obviously enough, brought into existence without their consent. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says that parents have obligations to their children because they “brought a person into the world without his consent” and so they “incur an obligation to make the child content with his condition so far as they can” (MS 6:280).²⁴

But even if this tells us something about the grounds of parental obligations, it does not tell us enough about the content of those obligations. For that, it would be useful to draw on what Joel Feinberg calls “the child’s right to an open future” (Feinberg 1980). Of course, children have certain rights in common with adults. Both adults and children have a right to life, for instance. But Feinberg explains a special class of rights that pertain only to children. We can think of these as “rights-in-trust” because they involve safeguarding future possibilities that the child cannot pursue at present. As Feinberg puts it:

When sophisticated autonomy rights are attributed to children who are clearly not yet capable of exercising them, their names refer to rights that are to be saved for the child until he is an adult, but which can be violated “in advance,” so to speak, before the child is even in a position to exercise them. The violating conduct guarantees now that when the child is an autonomous adult, certain key options will already be closed to him. His right while he is still a child is to have these future options kept open until he is a fully formed, self-determining adult capable of deciding among them. (Feinberg 1980, 76–77)

By refusing to cultivate any of the child’s capacities, the parents have arguably violated the child’s rights. No one chooses to be born, but everyone should have the right to choose what to do with their life. This means that parents must cultivate the capacities of their children so that they are able to set and pursue their own ends.²⁵

Of course, Kant wholeheartedly agrees. In the previous chapter, we saw how Kant viewed the cultivation of humanity as a moral obligation that you owe to yourself. He says that we have a duty “to make ourselves worthy of humanity by culture in general, by procuring or promoting the capacity to realize all sorts of possible ends, so far as this is to be found in the human being himself” (MS 6:392). But this is not the end of the story. Although you do owe this duty to yourself, Kant also claims that we owe this duty to one another and he believes that education and parenting are essential in this regard.²⁶ In his lectures on pedagogy, he says, “The human being can only become human through education. He is nothing except what education makes out of him” (UP 9:433). And in a lecture on anthropology, he makes it clear that freedom should be the aim of education (and child-rearing in general): “The child must be reared [to be] free, but in a way that it allows others [to be] free and does not, with its freedom, become detrimental to itself. Freedom is the sole condition where the human being can do something good [based] on his own disposition (AF 25:725).

This kind of freedom requires us to rationally deliberate about the value of ends, to choose ends on the basis of reflectively endorsed commitments, and to pursue those ends effectively.²⁷ In order to achieve this goal, Kant thinks that education (and child-rearing in general) must begin by teaching children to restrain the force of their inclinations. This is an essential component of what Kant calls “culture.” In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, he defines “culture” as the “production of the aptitude of a rational being for any ends in general (thus those of his freedom)” (KU 5:431).

In order to achieve the aim of culturing humanity, Kant identifies two components. First, there is “skill.” For instance, in order to pursue the aim of reading books, you must learn how to read. Second, there is “will,” which involves the ability to effectively pursue the ends that you are capable of setting. It is here that Kant sees untamed inclinations (or desires) as obstacles that can prevent us from achieving our goals. In a particularly lovely passage, he writes:

The latter condition of aptitude, which could be named the culture of training (discipline) is negative, and consists in the liberation of the will from the despotism of desires, by which we are made, attached as we are to certain things of nature, incapable of choosing for ourselves, while we turn into fetters the drives that nature has given us merely for guidance in order not to neglect or even injure the determination of the animality in us, while yet we are free enough to tighten or loosen them, to lengthen or shorten them, as the ends of reason require. (KU 5:432)

Even someone who is literate (like Esther) might find herself unable to achieve the end of reading because she is fettered by the despotism of her desires.²⁸

This is why Kant, like Rousseau, argues that the education of young children requires us to rein in their desires and to avoid creating bad habits.²⁹ It is much easier to avoid forming bad habits than it is to break one after it is established (something that any former smoker will confirm):

Habit is an enjoyment or action which has become a necessity through frequent repetition of the same pleasure or action. There is nothing to which children can accustom themselves more easily, and nothing which one should therefore give to them less, than piquant things; for example, tobacco, brandy, and warm drinks. Breaking the habit later is very difficult and is connected with hardship at first, because through the repeated enjoyment a change in our bodily functions has occurred. The more habits someone has, the less he is free and independent. It is the same with the human being as with all other animals: they always retain a certain propensity for that to which they were accustomed early. (UP 9:463)³⁰

Much of what Kant says in the lectures on pedagogy is perfectly in line with our aim in this section. Our concern about children becoming habituated to mobile devices and the attention economy is identical to Kant’s concern about other habits (like tobacco).³¹

He even singles out distraction as a worrisome habit that threatens to undermine the child’s education:

Distractions must never be tolerated, least of all at school, for they eventually produce a certain tendency in that direction, a certain habit. Even the most beautiful talents perish in one who is subject to distractions…Then they only hear half of everything, answer wrongly, do not know what they are reading, and so forth. (UP 9:473–74)

He goes on to argue that we must work to preserve our capacity for paying attention: “As concerns the strengthening of attention, it should be noted that this must be strengthened in general…Distraction is the enemy of all education” (UP 9:476).

Of course, for Kant, there is an undeniable moral drive behind this kind of education. By weakening the force of inclinations, parents and teachers make it easier for their children to subordinate their self-interested desires to the moral law.³² But it is easy to see how this also promotes personal autonomy more broadly. When it comes to their use of technology, if parents and teachers fail to teach children good habits, they do them a disservice with respect to their future autonomy. Like Esther, they may find themselves setting ends that they cannot successfully pursue.

It is for precisely this reason that so many parents have already become conscientious about their children’s use of mobile devices. Ironically, this trend is particularly strong in places like Silicon Valley. Journalist Nellie Bowles addressed this in an article titled “A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley.” Bowles interviewed parents who work in the tech industry about their household screen rules, and she found that many of them had very harsh words about the effects of screens on children. Chris Anderson, a former editor of Wired magazine, compared screen time to addictive drugs like crack cocaine, and another said, “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and it’s wreaking havoc on our children” (Bowles 2018a). Anderson lamented the mistakes he had already made with his own children: “I didn’t know what we were doing to their brains until I started to observe the symptoms and the consequences…This is scar tissue talking. We’ve made every mistake in the book, and I think we got it wrong with some of my kids,” Mr. Anderson said. “We glimpsed into the chasm of addiction, and there were some lost years, which we feel bad about” (Bowles 2018a). Bowles said that many of those who work in Silicon Valley have become “obsessed” with what mobile devices are doing to our brains. She says that “no tech homes are cropping up” in the area, and nannies are routinely asked to sign “no phone contracts.”³³

Given what we said earlier, this should come as no surprise. Of course the parents in Silicon Valley are concerned about their children using these products. They know how addictive these products are; that’s precisely how they were designed. But software developers are not the only ones who have taken notice. Organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Health Organization have recommended that children under age two get no screen time at all (except for video calls) and children from two to five should get less than an hour a day (Pappas 2020). In addition to the risk of developmental delays that are associated with screen usage at young ages (speech, socialization, etc.), the Canadian Paediatric Society points out that time away from screens is “critical for developing essential life skills such as self-regulation” (Ponti 2023).

Pediatricians and psychologists are alarmed about children’s use of mobile devices for many of the same reasons that we discussed in Chap. 3. They are concerned about the effects that these devices have on, e.g., attention, working memory, and executive function. They are also worried about the effects that these devices have on the mental health of teenagers. This is why the surgeon general recently issued a warning about how social media can “have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents” (United States 2023). All of the effects described in Chap. 3 are of concern when it comes to children, but there are good reasons to believe that technology poses an even graver threat to children, as their developing brains are especially vulnerable.³⁴

Excessive screen time has been linked to developmental delays in young children and it leads to worse academic performance in older children (Madigan et al. 2019, Sohn et al. 2019). When they are given too much screen time, children exhibit behavior (and brain activity) that “resembles substance use behavior” (Lissak 2018, 149).³⁵ And just as our knowledge of this threat is growing, children’s usage is spiking. A report in 2019 found that children between the ages of 13 and 18 were on screens for an average of 7 hours and 22 minutes per day (and that is excluding the time spent doing schoolwork or homework on screens).³⁶ Usage subsequently increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.³⁷ So it is safe to say that we should be concerned about children spending too much time using mobile devices and engaging with the attention economy.

On the flip side, we must recognize, as we did in the previous chapter, that the thoughtful, deliberate use of technology (including mobile devices) can enhance our autonomy. It would be a mistake to raise children who are computer illiterate or who do not know how to use a mobile phone at all. The potentially difficult task for parents and teachers is to promote the kind of thoughtful use of these tools that is conducive to autonomy, while guarding against the compulsive or addictive usage that undermines autonomy.

It may seem difficult to thread this needle, but this is precisely what the research suggests we ought to do. Sziron and Hildt (2018) present empirical evidence arguing for precisely this conclusion, and they link their conclusion to Feinberg’s concept of the child’s right to an open future:

A child’s right to an open future requires parents, software engineers, designers, policy makers, and marketers understanding the ramifications of digital media for ages 0–5. Children’s first interactions with digital media need to be supplemental for developing autonomy, digital citizenship, and culturally responsible use of technology, while avoiding negative privacy implications, the risks of digital divide, and “being like adults.” Ethical development of future digital media technology should take into consideration the child, as a child with an open future, in the hopes of maintaining that open future. (2018, 3)

There are various ways that parents and teachers can try to strike this balance. First, the recommendations about screen time vary by age. Although the rules are highly restrictive at young ages (especially for kids two and under), they are more lax for older children. Second, the empirical findings suggest that there are significant benefits when parents and teachers are present during the screen time (co-viewing), as they can engage with the child about the content and supplement their learning with further discussion (Pappas 2020). Third, the quality of the content matters. It has been shown that slow-paced content (like Sesame Street or other PBS programs) can foster learning in young children (Ibid.).

But there is a stark contrast between the kind of content that was made to be slow and educational versus the kind that is meant to maximize engagement. For years, Netflix has kept records of its top ten most popular programs. And there is one program that has consistently broken every record and remained on the most-watched list longer than any other program: CoComelon.³⁸ Parents who have struggled with the effect this program has on their children are fighting an uphill battle. CoComelon was meticulously designed to capture the attention of young children. The company who produces it runs a lab that tracks the eyeball movement in young children, making notes every time that a child looks away from the program.³⁹ This should remind us once more of the alignment problem. When content is designed to maximize engagement, it may fail to promote other values that matter to us (such as producing content that is edifying or, at the very least, content that does not stoke the flames of the dopamine-fueled forest fire that is undermining children’s capacities).

Thus, the first and most important thing we can do as parents and teachers is to take notice of this issue and realize that it requires us to be more deliberate about how our children and students engage with technology. If we allow them to default into whatever relationship with it they want, we are giving free rein to the software developers and tech companies whose main goal is to maximize the time our children spend looking at screens. If parents and teachers are morally obligated to cultivate autonomy, then they must do more when it comes to mobile devices and the attention economy. Sometimes beneficence means not giving someone what they want (or what they think they want).⁴⁰ This is especially true of children who are not capable of fully understanding the consequences of their choices.

Let us close the section by briefly noting that we, as parents and teachers, acknowledge that one implication of what we have said here is that parents and teachers, who are too often undersupported and overburdened, have yet another burden to bear. But let us also note a larger theme of this chapter and coming chapters: we are not in this alone. Just as parents and teachers have obligations to their children and students to promote their autonomy, others—individually and collectively—have obligations to support them in achieving this end.

5.3.2 Implications for Close Friends

Before moving on, we would like to comment briefly on one last context where duties of beneficence may include a duty to promote digital minimalism in others. Parenting and education are special cases. These are two domains where the cultivation of autonomy is a constitutive aim of the activities in question. But we also believe that the duty to be an attention ecologist could extend to close friendships.⁴¹

Kant concludes the Doctrine of Virtue with a discussion of friendship.⁴² Like Aristotle, Kant thinks that the highest form of friendship involves a moral component.⁴³ It cannot be a relationship that simply boils down to mutual advantage. His ideal of friendship is “the union of two persons through equal mutual love and respect” (MS 6:469). He thinks that friendship should involve the moral perfection of one another: “From a moral point of view it is, of course, a duty for one of the friends to point out the other’s faults to him; this is in the other’s best interests and is therefore a duty of love” (MS 6:470). Earlier in this chapter, we explained how duties to morally perfect others can be understood in terms of beneficence. Kant understands beneficence as furthering someone else’s ends as if they were your own. And given that other people are (or ought to be) committed to morally perfecting themselves, we can promote their ends by helping them along in their journey of perpetual moral progress.

But Kant recognizes that this can be a delicate matter. The other friend might take offense when you point out their flaws. They may see this as a failure of respect. So it is not as if we should all go around telling all of our friends that they use their phones too much. But there are indeed moments where we may be in a position to help. For instance, if someone comes to you complaining about how their phone is interfering with their productivity or sleep, you could help them by showing them ways of reducing their usage (turning off notifications during work, keeping their phone outside the bedroom at night, etc.).

Once again, as a duty of love, you must use discretion when it comes to being an attention ecologist. In some cases, it will be appropriate to help a close friend restructure their relationship with their phone. In other instances, you might be overstepping a boundary and failing to respect their autonomy. This brings us to the topic of the next section. In addition to duties of love, we also have duties of respect. And this will require us to extend our discussion beyond the domains of teachers, parents, and close friends.

5.4 Applications of the Duty II: Never as a Mere Means

We focused above on positive duties associated with attention ecology, specifically as they play out in our relations to those who may not have yet developed their capacities for autonomy (e.g., children), cases where we are in a role that has developing the capacities for autonomy as a legitimate constitutive aim (e.g., teacher), and in cases where we bear an intimate relationship to someone and might be in a special position to legitimately take on the promotion of their self-governance (e.g., close friends).

But the demands of attention ecology do not apply to only these relationships which, as Kant would have characterized them, fall under the banner “love,”⁴⁴ that is, duties which consist of adopting others’ permissible ends as our own (MS 6:450). Indeed, there are relationships that are in some sense thinner than these that still activate the negative side of the duty, which would fall under the banner of “respect.” Respect is a duty to refrain from using others as mere means (MS 6:450). Importantly, what distinguishes this duty (which falls under the banner of “virtue”) from others we will explore in the next chapter (which fall under the banner of “right”) is that they must, like duties of love, be accompanied by a practical feeling. That is, the duty includes recognizing others’ status as moral agents.

5.4.1 Implications for Employers

Like parents and teachers, employers are in a privileged position to set ends for their employees. They do this all the time by giving them tasks, setting deadlines, telling them when they should arrive at work, when they can leave, etc. But unlike parents and teachers, employers are not necessarily obligated to cultivate the autonomy of their employees. Like everyone else, however, employers are morally required to respect the autonomy of their employees. Kant’s moral theory requires us to always refrain from using others as mere means. When describing such duties of respect in the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says, “The duty of respect for my neighbor is contained in the maxim not to degrade any other to a mere means to my ends (not to demand that another throw himself away in order to slave for my end)” (MS 6:450).

This does not mean that Kant objects to wage labor as such.⁴⁵ But his ethical theory does provide us with the resources to condemn conditions of employment in which the employee is subject to unjust domination. In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), Elizabeth Anderson argues that employers’ power has become tyrannical as their control over their employees’ lives now extends far beyond reasonable boundaries. She points to examples where employers regulate their “employees’ diet, clothing, political speech, and use of drugs” (Anderson 2017, 39). She even cites extreme cases where employers deny employees adequate bathroom breaks, forcing them to wear diapers (Anderson 2017, 135).⁴⁶

There is something deeply objectionable about employers having this much control over the lives of their employees.⁴⁷ It is one thing for employers to set deadlines for employees, and it is quite another for them to restrict their use of bathrooms or their freedom of speech. To use Kant’s definition of respect, we could say that these employers have degraded their employees to mere means; they are being asked to “throw themselves away” to slave away for someone else’s ends.

We would like to extend Anderson’s analysis to the ways that employers require employees to use technology. As we mentioned earlier in our discussion of external constraints in Chap. 3, many employers require employees to remain in constant contact through digital channels (email, text message, WhatsApp, Slack, etc.), and this inevitably requires workers to have an unhealthy relationship with their mobile devices. They find themselves responding to messages after work hours, checking email when they are trying to sleep, and so on.

The external constraint is not the only drag on autonomy here. It is not merely that employers are requiring employees to use devices in ways that they do not want to use them. We are also concerned about the downstream effects that this has. Imagine having a job that requires you to take a pill every day. The pill makes you work harder for eight hours, but it has some unwelcome side effects. When you sit down to read a novel in your free time, you find yourself struggling to read. You also find that the pill causes feelings of alertness in the evenings, and this interferes with your sleep.

Many workers would rightly object to such an arrangement. It is not just that the employer is requiring you to take a pill (an external constraint), it is that the pill is weakening your capacities more generally. In an effort to squeeze more productivity out of you, the employer is making it harder for you to read and get enough sleep. They are making you less capable of setting and pursuing your own ends. This is a violation of the duty to respect others as ends in themselves and refrain from using them as a mere means. Obviously, requiring workers to respond to emails after working hours isn’t nearly as egregious as denying workers bathroom breaks to such an extent that they end up in diapers. We are not defending such a false equivalence. Nevertheless, both situations may be seen as instances of domination and can thus be understood as expressing disrespect for the employees’ humanity.⁴⁸

In the previous section, we explained what Kant meant by the duty to refrain from “giving scandal.” The idea was to avoid leading others into temptation, preventing them from acting in ways that are inconsistent with their moral obligations. If we recognize that other people are obligated to cultivate their capacities (a component of their duty to respect humanity in their own person), then we would be wronging them if we did something that made it more difficult for them to fulfill that obligation.

This is not identical to the case described above where parents refused to foster the autonomy of their child. That was an instance of someone failing to fulfill a positive obligation. Parents have a positive obligation to cultivate their children’s capacities. Employers are under no such obligation. But they are, nevertheless, required to refrain from undermining the autonomy of their employees. And by requiring employees to have a problematic relationship with their mobile devices, employers are violating this duty.

There are several ways to avoid such work arrangements. Workplaces could establish firmer boundaries and explain that employees do not need to respond to emails on weekends or in the evening. The problem, of course, is that companies who enact such a lax policy might worry that they are giving an edge to their competitors who require their employees to be in communication 24/7. But, as Cal Newport argues in A World Without Email, there are reasons to believe that companies are not achieving maximal efficiency by requiring workers to be in constant communication. He writes, “When employees are miserable they perform worse” (2021, 38). He points to the high costs of burnout and turnover to argue that companies may fare better if they allowed employees to have some boundaries when it comes to technology. So this might not be such a significant worry after all.

Nevertheless, it may be difficult to make these changes at an individual level. Even when it comes to internal triggers, many of us struggle to establish healthy boundaries when it comes to work emails. There is also social pressure, which does not necessarily come from one’s supervisors or managers. For instance, we might worry about our teaching evaluations if we know that our colleagues are responding to student emails over the weekend or late at night. For this reason, we must think of some of these issues as collective action problems—ones where it takes more than an individual effort to address the concern. It is just like James Williams said, you cannot solve a pollution problem by wearing a gas mask.⁴⁹ We will address the collective perspective in Chap. 7, and we will discuss policies like the French labor law in Chap. 6. But first, we should discuss other instances of the duty to respect the autonomy of others.

5.4.2 Implications for Developers and Deployers

Throughout the book, we have discussed how tech companies and developers have leveraged the psychology of addiction in order to get us hooked on their products. As Eyal (2014) explains, their aim is to make us so habituated to their use that we unlock our phones without giving it a moment’s thought. They do this by taking advantage of various psychological vulnerabilities: the desire for social approval, feelings of urgency, fear of missing out, etc. We saw in Chap. 3 how this often leads to deleterious consequences for those who end up using mobile devices in excess.

Within the framework of Kantian ethics, it is easy to explain why this action is morally wrong. When tech companies or developers act this way, they are pursuing their own ends (maximizing profit by means of maximizing engagement) with little or no regard for our capacity to set and pursue our own ends. We are treated as mere means. When he was at Google, Tristan Harris repeatedly explained his concerns to his co-workers, and he ultimately resigned when he realized that he would not be able to make significant changes. Companies like Google (whose products like YouTube depend crucially on maximally capturing our attention) are held hostage by a business model that is incompatible with concerns for the autonomy of their users.

Harris gave his first presentation on this topic to Google in 2013. It was titled, “A Call to Minimize Distraction and Respect Users’ Attention.” He raised many of the worries that we have discussed in this book, and he takes careful note of the psychological vulnerabilities that are exploited by tech companies. In one slide, he acknowledges how the conflict of interest presents an obstacle to making industry-wide changes:

The problem is … successful products compete by exploiting these vulnerabilities, so they can’t remove them without sacrificing their success and growth, creating an arms race that causes companies to find more reasons to steal people’s time. A tragedy of the commons that destroys our common silence and ability to think. (Harris 2013)

In our discussion of beneficence, we mentioned the parity between perfect and imperfect duties. Following Wood (1999), we claimed that you have an imperfect duty to promote certain ends (e.g., the happiness of others), and you have a perfect duty to refrain from setting ends that are antithetical to the ends you are required to adopt. When tech companies adopt the end of pursuing profit by maximizing engagement, they fail to respect the autonomy of the people who use their products. They make it harder for us to be fully autonomous. We are more distracted and anxious; we get less sleep; we find it harder to focus; etc. We struggle to fulfill our duty to cultivate humanity and perfect our rational capacities.

What’s more, Kantian ethics has the resources to explain why such actions would be wrong even if they failed to achieve their aim. Because Kant’s ethics does not fundamentally ground the wrongness of actions in their consequences, it can condemn the disrespect of an action regardless of its failure to cause actual harm. By contrast, some people may hold the view that Rosa wrongs Hanlon only if Rosa’s action makes Hanlon worse off in some respect than he otherwise would have been (if the action had not been performed).⁵⁰ But this principle is subject to some well-known counterexamples.⁵¹ For instance, Woodward (1986) presents an example of a Black man who tries to buy an airplane ticket but the airline refuses to sell him one because it has a policy of racial discrimination. The plane goes on to crash and everyone who was on board dies.⁵² Obviously, we cannot say that the man is worse off than he otherwise would have been. If the airline had let him buy a ticket, he would have died. Nevertheless, it seems clear that he was wronged. Woodward suggests that the wrongness may consist in the fact he was treated unfairly or unjustly. Or, on Kantian grounds, we could say that this is a failure of respect.⁵³

So even if tech companies have not managed to undermine your autonomy in any way, they have still treated you with disrespect insofar as they developed and marketed products with total disregard for your capacity to set and pursue your own ends.⁵⁴ The duty to refrain from “giving scandal” requires you to avoid tempting others to transgress the moral law. You must not make it harder for them to fulfill their obligations. If you place temptations in their path, you have acted wrongly whether they succumb or not.

There are many things that tech companies can do to improve in this regard. Tristan Harris made four suggestions in his presentation:

• We can design to reduce the volume and frequency of interruptions.

• We can design to be respectful about when to notify users—let it wait, unless it’s important.

• We can design to keep users focused, by putting temptations further away when they’re trying to accomplish goals.

• We can batch up notifications & messages into digests by default, instead of one at a time.⁵⁵

We must recognize, as Harris did, that this is an uphill battle. Tech companies realize that these suggestions are at odds with their aim of maximizing our screen time. This is akin to asking tobacco companies to switch to products that do not contain nicotine. In order to make significant progress, tech companies may have to abandon this business model altogether. For instance, they could move to models where users pay monthly fees instead of generating all of their revenue from advertising. There will surely be costs associated with such transitions, but that very well may be what morality demands.

5.5 Conclusion

In this chapter, we have defended the existence of a duty to be an attention ecologist—a duty to promote digital minimalism in others. We followed Kant in adopting the distinction between duties of love and duties of respect. The former can be understood as obligations to cultivate the virtue of digital minimalism in others. In particular, we discussed parents and teachers, who have special obligations to cultivate the autonomy of their children and students. This also applies to close friends who wish to promote the ends of their loved ones. Duties of respect, by contrast, are obligations to refrain from tempting others by luring them into the vice of technological heteronomy. We paid special attention to the duties of respect for employers and developers.

Of course, duties of respect could be applied more broadly. Parents and teachers are equally obligated to refrain from “giving scandal.” Kantian ethics is committed to the idea that we must always treat others as ends in themselves and never as a mere means. When it comes to the use of technology, this means that we have positive duties to promote good habits in others and we have negative duties to refrain from tempting others into a compulsive relationship that undermines their autonomy.

As we explained in the introduction, these are all duties of virtue. They concern the moral obligations of individuals, and this excludes the possibility of intervention by the state. In the next chapter, we turn to duties of right as we explore the possibility of legislation that might improve this situation. We do not think that legislation should be seen as a panacea, and we should exercise caution when it comes to enacting such laws. But it is worth exploring the moral grounds of such laws, as Kant’s political philosophy provides an interesting perspective on the importance of the state’s role in preserving our freedom.